the lack of great side quests, poor or lacking communication between quest giver and your character, rather short main quest line
they even added fetch quests called Gigs to replace incredibly detailed side quests in Witcher
Fully agree. These are the main problems in my view. Everything else is forgivable, even the laughable hacker combat.
But not lousy quests. CDPR's main claim to fame is good side quests. They had around 100 in TW3. CP2077 has fewer side quests than TW2, which was CDPR's smallest game.
And, yes, it also has "gigs", which are mainly told through codex and phone conversations with 'fixers'. They're mindless and they follow around 5 cookie cutter templates: kill these guys and open a box, rescue this person, implant this virus, steal this object or car, or kill that cyberpsycho. Only occasionally are they something else, such as talk to a vending machine or meditate at a waterfall.
I did 90% of the gigs. I'm quite patient and I nearly always read the codex in games, but I started skipping it here. There's just nothing of note in any of them. Just loads of hot air about people going crazy from cyberware. 'Crazy' is just not interesting.
The most disturbing thing is that they thought this game was finished in early 2020 and it just needed debugging. Someone in a management position decided that 200 fetchy 'gig' quests was a finished game. And now they're saying they're proud of the PC version.
Yeah, this isn't the same CDPR that made TW3. That CDPR is dead.